From Nat’l Journal, One of the Most Biased Reports Seen in Some Time

Once in a while a purported news report is so biased that it simply must be highlighted. Today’s award for the most biased report goes to National Journal for its left-slanted piece on Obama’s warning to the House GOP that he will veto any budget that cancels his FCC attempt to take control of the Internet away from private industry.

In his very first paragraph for the National Journal, Josh Smith dives straight into the left side of the pool — and in at the deep end yet — by accepting the left’s premise of what the FCC’s net neutrality regulations are meant to do.

The White House threatened on Monday to veto any bill from Congress that would scuttle new rules aimed at keeping internet access free and open. (My bold)

Keeping the Internet “free and open”? That is the left’s fanciful contention of what net neutrality does, sure enough, and National Journal parroted that line as if it is a truthful, straightforward description of what the rules do.

Smith then went on to further bolster the left’s case in favor of net neutrality by claiming that the FCC’s power grab was merely, “designed to prevent Internet carriers from blocking websites that use too much bandwidth.”

Notice there wasn’t any exposition of the left’s real stated ultimate goal for net neutrality: to end copyright laws and make the Internet a business free zone. That is what the chief net neutrality advocate Free Press has said repeatedly. The end game as far as Free Press is concerned is to stop anyone from making money on the Internet and for everything thereupon to be wholly free all subsidized by government.

Worse for any fair reporting on the issue, the right side of the argument against net neutrality was given not a single word of explanation for the reader. After reading Smith’s piece all one comes away with is some vague notion that Republicans are against a “free and open Internet” for some reason and must be for big business being allowed to shut individual Internet users down on a corporate whim.

But what is the truth? Why are Republicans against the FCC’s attempt to take control of the Internet? Well, since neither Josh Smith nor National Journal want to give an unbiased report, I’ll tell you a few of the reasons that conservatives stand against Obama’s FCC net neutrality rules.

First of all, the net neutrality regulation is a naked power grab by an unelected, Obama-appointed regulatory agency. The FCC simply decided on its own that it should take control of the Internet. No laws written, no act of Congress initiated, and no accountability to check the FCC’s power created. Simply put the FCC simply decided to take control of the Internet because it has accepted the ten-year desire of the most left-wing of left-wingers and Obama supports that agenda.

Other reasons conservatives stand against the FCC’s powergrab is that government control of the Internet is sure to quash innovation and that just as the Internet is becoming the newest engine of economic expansion in a down economy. As the FCC continues to expand its grip on the Internet and as it institutes more and more regulations upon it this will cause uncertainty in the industry and will drive innovators away from even trying their hand at new ideas, new businesses, and new applications for the technology.

Further, the main reason that the left claims that net neutrality is necessary is little else but a scare tactic. The left claims that the rules are meant to prevent Internet providers from putting limits on high bandwidth users. The left pushes this claim as if it is going on all the time and is something that eeevil corporations do simply because they are meanies. But this scenario has not really come to pass. Internet providers are not putting caps on usage anywhere. This is fearmongering instead of a solution to a real problem.

There are a lot more arguments against net neutrality than I’ve listed here, but the last point I’ll mention is freedom of speech. The left claims that its net neutrality regulations are meant to safeguard “freedom” but this is a smoke screen to hide government control of Internet content. After all, if the government takes full control of the Internet like the FCC, the far left, and President Obama want content regulation would naturally follow and that would mean that government would have the power to shut down free speech on the Internet.

Anyone that imagines that the government will take control of a thing and then not regulate what people can and cannot do with that thing is foolish in the extreme. Once the government has decided that it controls the Internet, proscriptions against free speech are sure to follow.

But the left does not mind that at all. After all, they think they will be the ones in control. They are sure that they will have the power to shut down the free speech of anyone that they don’t like. They’ll be in control.

As I said, there is far more to this issue than National Journal allowed its readers any hint of finding out about. Sadly, National Journal sold itself to the left’s position on net neutrality and destroyed any chance that it could serve as a true, unbiased news source.

Warner Todd Huston

Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago-based freelance writer, has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and is featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment.com, BigJournalsim.com and all Breitbart News' other sites, RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, and many, many others. Additionally, he has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs across the country to discuss his opinion editorials and current events as well as appearing on TV networks such as CNN, Fox News, Fox Business Network, and various Chicago-based news programs.
He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the book "Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture" which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of PubliusForum.com.
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